Setting the mood: Adirondack chairs greet arriving Wawona guests, beckoning them to slow down and breathe deeply. Chronicle photo by John Flinn

Setting the mood: Adirondack chairs greet arriving Wawona guests, beckoning them to slow down and breathe deeply. Chronicle photo by John Flinn

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Photo: Courtesy Delaware North

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Yosemite's time capsule of Old West / Rustic Wawona a fitting base for pilgrimage to giant redwoods

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2006-06-04 04:00:00 PDT Yosemite National Park -- What is it about an Adirondack chair? There's something in its shape and heritage that says, "Come. Sit. Breathe the pine-scented air. Relax." If ever there were a piece of furniture that could talk a teetotaler into a gin and tonic, it would be this one.

A pair of beckoning Adirondack chairs is the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the parking lot at Wawona, and they're a fitting symbol of the place. After the sensory overload and jostling hordes of Yosemite Valley, Wawona invites you to slow down, unwind and inhale the cool, fragrant mountain air.

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Located near the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park, Wawona is a time capsule from the stagecoach days, when it was a welcome stop on the long, dusty, tooth-loosening road to Yosemite Valley. President Ulysses S. Grant visited in 1879, and this paper reported that "so much dust covered the General that he looked as if he had been engaged in the most hotly contested battle of the wilderness."

Today doormen no longer meet guests at the hotel entrance with feather dusters, but otherwise Wawona recaptures the look and feel of that era. The Victorian-style Wawona Hotel, with its hand-split shingle roof and wide verandahs, dates back to 1879 and is one of the oldest continually operated hotels in the American West. It's a National Historic Landmark.

The park's concessionaire, Delaware North, spent $400,000 renovating the hotel in 2002, furnishing rooms with reproduction period furniture, marble-topped dressers, lace curtains and 19th century-style wallpaper and bathroom fixtures. Brochures describe the hotel as "European-style," which is a nice way of saying that about half the 104 rooms have bathrooms down the hall.

The rooms, it should be said, are small and not to everyone's liking. The walls are thin, there are no televisions or phones, and some visitors see them more as ramshackle than rustic, judging by some of the comments in online forums such as TripAdvisor.com. My wife, Jeri, and I spent very little waking time in our room -- even though we sprung for a private bathroom -- and we thought it was OK, although at $183 a night it seemed overpriced. That's to be expected in most national parks, where the concessionaire has a monopoly.

There was a long wait for a table in the dining room -- pretty much the only dining choice in the area -- but we passed it enjoyably with a cocktail in a wicker chair on the verandah, serenaded by the old-time piano stylings of Tom Bopp, a fixture here for the past 23 years.

The dinner menu offered fare such as trout and rib-eye steaks, plus some fancier items like ancho chile-grilled North Pacific salmon with avocado aioli. Our meals were well prepared, but the service was harried. Overall we thought it good, but perhaps not $23-per-entree good.

In the morning we took a quick stroll past Wawona's other historic buildings, including a covered bridge, before heading over to the area's biggest attraction, the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

Every Californian should be required, every five years or so, to stand in the presence of a redwood tree. They are, without question, one of the wonders of the world, and they grow naturally nowhere else. By one estimate, they're the largest living things on earth.

About 500 of them stand in Mariposa Grove. Topping out at around 300 feet, they aren't quite as tall as their cousins, the coastal redwoods, but they make up for it with their incredible girth -- some have diameters of 30 feet or more. There's a free shuttle from Wawona, and it's a good idea to take it. We didn't, and if a car hadn't pulled out of a spot right in front of us we would have spent half an hour circling the full parking lot.

The trails through the grove require some gentle but sustained uphill walking, and many visitors opt for the $16 tram tour, with recorded narration in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and German. Jeri and I chose instead to walk. With shafts of godly light slanting down from above, the grove has the aura of a cathedral -- an overused but unavoidably apt metaphor -- and to my mind it requires a reverent silence.

Individual trees have their own personalities and followings. The undisputed king of the forest is the Grizzly Giant, which has been holding court for somewhere between 1,600 and 2,700 years, making it the oldest in the grove. It's so enormous that its 6-foot-thick branches are larger than most of the world's trees.

The Wawona Tunnel Tree started the uniquely Californian craze of drive-through trees in 1881 when hucksters carved a hole through its base large enough for horse-drawn carriages and, later, automobiles. It provided fleeting amusement to generations of visitors until the tree, weakened by the hole and automotive exhaust, toppled over and died in 1969. It's still lying there, a fitting monument to our national priorities. It's now called "the Fallen Tunnel Tree."

There's a second tunnel tree in the grove -- the "California Tunnel Tree," carved in 1895 -- but now it's open only to pedestrian traffic. I stood there tsk-tsking about it for a few moments before giving into temptation and strolling through one of the world's largest living things. I mean, how often do you get the chance?

It's a memory I could relive later in the comfortable confines of my Wawona Adirondack chair.

If you go

Getting there

Wawona is 192 miles from San Francisco at the southern (Highway 41) entrance to Yosemite National Park, half an hour's drive from Yosemite Valley.

Where to stay

Wawona Hotel, (559) 253-5635, www.yosemitepark.com. Rooms with bath $183, without bath $126, plus 10 percent tax. There are other options in different price ranges 7 miles away, just outside the park boundary in Fish Camp.

Where to eat

The hotel's dining room is your only option unless you want to drive. Dinner entrees $16-$29.

What to do

A seasonal free shuttle leaves from the Wawona Store every half-hour or so to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, 4 miles away. At the grove, tram tours with recorded narration run about every 20 minutes and cost $16 for adults.